TH E T A B L E T , February 18th, I960

THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

PRO ECCLESIA DEI, PRO REGE ET PATRIA

VOL. 195, No. 5726

FOUNDED IN 1840

LONDON, FEBRUARY 18th, 1950

SIXPENCE

PUBLISHED AS A NEWSPAPER

BEFORE THE POLL The Great Issue Dividing the Nation

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IN THE NEW INDIA

By The Rt. Rev. Thomas Pothacamury, Bishop of Bangalore

MOSLEM AND CHRISTIAN The Common Interests in the Near East THE STATE OF THE FRENCH ARMY

General Billotte Sounds the Alarm

THE FATE OF INSURANCE

By C. J . Woollen

ON SAMUEL BUTLER

By Christopher Hollis

OUR ATLANTIC WORLD M ANY speakers in this election talk of Marshall Aid and its projected termination in 1952, when it is more important to understand that there is a continuing problem of a trade equilibrium between the new world and the old, something greatly hastened and accentuated by the two world wars, but also emerging all the time in peace, that both North and South America were taking less and less in proportion from Britain and Europe. One great and natural way o f finding a new equilibrium in an expanding world economy is for the Americans to invest more in our own and other countries.

The former head o f U.S. Economic Warfare, Dr. Milo Perkins, in Harpers Magazine, has drawn up a list o f the conditions necessary to carry out President Truman’s fourth point, when he said in his Inaugural Address a year ago that “ the use of America's resources to help the outside world” was “ a long range venture in which private capital should take the lead.” Mr. Perkins now urges that “ the United States should make treaties to secure the simple assurance that its business men will be treated as fairly when they go to another country as the nationals o f that country are treated when they go to the United States to engage in business. Unless they get reciprocally fair treatment,” he went on, “ and unless there is a chance to make a profit to commensurate the risk o f doing business abroad, Americans are not going to invest their savings in factories in other lands. This is so elementary that it is silly to pussyfoot on the issue.” He goes on to argue that those nations which co-operate will be entitled to a bigger slice o f the American market for their own produce, and he recommends selective tariff cuts for countries which have given evidence of their willingness. All this is surely elementary common sense, that we must not think in three compartments but in one, not separate our dollar problem, the development of our Empire and the unification of Europe, but approach them all together, welcoming American investment in the Empire, thinking of all Europe and all Africa as one vast area, one half o f the great Atlantic system in which trade must be as free as possible. This is the economic side of a policy which has already had to be developed very far on its military side.

When it was known that Lord Beaverbrook was hurrying back for the general election, there was much well-founded nervousness among the Conservatives. And he has not been back many days before Mr. Churchill is calling for talks between President Truman and Stalin and the next British Prime Minister, and Lord Beaverbrook’s Evening Standard is bringing out again one o f its most mistaken and discredited lines o f argument, writing that Britain, midway between America and Russia, is “ ideally placed to act as a mediating influence.” There is hardly a nation in Europe which has not cast itself for this role, which the late Dr. Benes of tragic memory assumed particularly for himself. And any man who talks this language shows a profound misconception of where we do and must stand. We have nothing to say to the Russians that the Americans cannot say, and say with a great deal more weight today. We take the words from their mouths if we say, again, that all the Western world wants peace, would like a world with few armaments, a great and growing trade and consequent rising standards, and what political and ideological controversy there is to be carried on inside the framework of civilized conventions. We want these things more than we want the moon, but we have about as much prospect o f obtaining and enjoying them ; for the revolutionaries who now command from Moscow so much o f the earth’s surface and population do not want, for themselves or for us, any o f these things. They want the opposite to all these things. We are sorry that this should be brought into the general election, and that any language suggesting that there is any fruitful mediatory role for Britain to play should be circulated when the hopes of mankind against perils which dwarf and make rather absurd preoccupations with industrial security, depend, and will depend more and more, on the solidarity and unanimity of all the Western world. The great danger is that the process o f Communist penetration and corrosion, the detachment and destruction of countries one by one, will go on, that national electorates may be tempted to think they might be safer outside the Atlantic pact, and to believe that there are possibilities, which do not really exist, o f contracting out of the risks of solidarity. Any suggestions o f a divided mind in the Anglo-American front to the Kremlin have farreaching and bad repercussions round the world. The Sword o f Damocles

The Government o f Eastern Germany have announced their decision to investigate the political history o f every citizen o f the Soviet zone, and the reorganized police force has been entrusted with the task o f compiling files on some 20,000,000 people. They will all be issued with a questionnaire in which they will state to which political parties they belonged before the Nazi period, what was their political standing in the Third Reich, which offices they held in the National Socialist Party, and so on. The most important question, however, does not concern their past but their present political allegiance. Whatever the assurances of Herr Warnke, the State Secret rry o f the Ministry o f Interior, who announced the new move and professed that it was quite immaterial whether those questioned are now members of the left or the right, the objects o f the investigation know very